A framework for managing the Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle (AISL)

Funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported this project, which examined barriers that prevent information sharing, and subsequently developed a framework to support assured information sharing.

This project was led by Dr. Tim Finin at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and included a team of researchers from UMBC, Purdue University, and the Universities of Illinois, Texas at Dallas, and Texas at San Antonio in addition to the University of Michigan.

Start date: 5/1/2008End date: 9/30/2012

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The Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle (AISL) was a three-year Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research that focused on developing an integrated framework to support assured information sharing.

The research was framed by the recognition of a life cycle for shared information comprising five phases: advertising and discovery, negotiation for access and usage rights, integration and analysis, generation of new knowledge and data, and preparation of data for possible release. The project focused on creating novel assured information sharing models and frameworks and new policy languages and systems that support them. It also developed algorithms and systems for information integration, analysis, and mining that assure quality and protect privacy. The project also analyzed social aspects of information sharing including incentives for sharing and exploiting knowledge of underlying social networks and relations, and focused on implementing and evaluating experimental software architectures and systems to realize the assured information sharing life cycle.

The project was conducted under the guidance of three high-level objectives:

To better understand the fundamental barriers preventing people and organizations from sharing information with appropriate constraints on security, privacy and quality;

To design and develop new theoretical and practical mechanisms and techniques to eliminate or reduce those barriers; and

To prototype components and systems embodying these ideas and evaluate the results

Motivated by numerous factors, including problems in managing sensitive information surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, researchers saw increasing importance and challenges in managing Web information and services with appropriate security, privacy and simplicity. They also recognized the need for sharing across autonomous devices like mobile phones, routers and medical equipment, with particular interest paid to the privacy issues raised by electronic medical records.

The project focused on developing a software framework based on a secure semantic event-based service oriented architecture; novel policy languages, reasoning engines and negotiation strategies; and techniques for information integration, analysis and quality. IT also sought to secure knowledge management for AISL based on risk and incentives, and establish techniques to exploit social networks to enhance AISL. For each of these areas, researchers contributed to the underlying theory and algorithms and built prototypes of software components and systems.

Findings from this research have helped to shape a number of Professor Adamic’s studies, including the following:

Rating Friends without Making Enemies, which explored the challenges of faceted ratings on the social media site CouchSurfing.org, including differentiating and quantifying inherently subjective feelings such as friendship and trust.

Grants

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) expands scientific knowledge through its leadership and management of the Air Force's basic research program. As a vital component of the Air Force Research Laboratory, AFOSR's mission is to support control and maximum utilization of air, space, and cyberspace. AFOSR accomplishes its mission by investing in basic research efforts in relevant scientific areas.